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Chewing Food More Thoroughly Results in Reduced Insulin Output (2013)
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoAnecdotal experience: when I was bodybuilding and eating 5-6 meals a day, I've found that constantly chewing on bubble gum aided my digestion and eliminated any bloating after meals.
- lambdaba 6y agoIt's the saliva, this is a pretty evident result in my view, digestion starts with chewing, obviously saliva plays a central role.
- James_Henry 6y agoIt is much more than just saliva.
- tlb 6y agoI wish the control was waiting for the same interval between bites. As it is, the study measures the combined effect of more chewing and slower eating. Also, the control is 15 chews? My experience of teenage boys eating pizza is 3 chews max.
- coldtea 6y ago>As it is, the study measures the combined effect of more chewing and slower eating. Don't those two go together naturally?
- dagw 6y agoI could chew a piece 2 times, swallow, and wait 30 seconds before eating the next piece. Or I can chew 15 times, swallow, and immediately eat the next piece. If it's the 30 second wait that is the key rather than the actual chewing then you can tell people to focus on that rather than counting chews.
- ivanhoe 6y agoIt's about the amount of pre-processing the food gets in our mouth, so the effect they're measuring depends on the time the food has spent in the mouth, in contact with enzymes from saliva, and how finely ground it was by our teeth. A bit hard to put that into a single easy to understand metric.
- tomgp 6y agoyes, that is the assumption, but I couldn't find anywhere in the paper that they controll for time as suggested by the upthread posts -- I admit to only skimming it though.
- Someone 6y agoThat’s exactly why tlb is asking that question. The effect could be just from slower eating.
- tlb 6y agoThe wisdom I received in childhood was to put your knife and fork down between bites, to regulate eating speed. Is chewing longer better? That's what I wished this study told me.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoEating more slowly is most beneficial because it makes you feel full before you overeat so much, which has a much larger effect than insulin response.
- dwighttk 6y agoPer slice!
- hammock 6y agoMy grandmother (who was very old guard proper type) taught us that every bitter should be chewed 26 times before swallowing. And of course, out your utensils down between bites.
- nyghtly 6y agoMy parents (tried and failed) to teach me similar values that they learned from their own parents. But it got me thinking--I wonder if these "old guard" values are related to food scarcity? We (peoples of industrialized nations), live in a world of abundance when it comes to food. High calorie food sources are cheap and plentiful. We don't need to chew our cheerios so much, because a machine already chewed them for us. We don't need to chew our chicken so much, because there's more where that came from. In fact, the "chew your food" lesson in childhood always came up during meals where we ate steak, and not so much other meals. Now part of this was due to the fact that the steak was tough and chewy (they cooked it well-done). However, I think it's worth considering the fact that steak is expensive, and if I was eating steak then there was not more where that came from. So maybe part of that "chew your food" lesson was actually a different one: "savor this food, because it's the last that you'll have until tomorrow." Notably, my recent ancestors were Okies.
- hammock 6y agoCould be, my grandmother's parents were Boston brahmins I think so food was not usually scarce. My general understanding was that it's uncouth to devour or inhale your food at the table. In that sense the nuance is not that this might be the last food you get for a while - but rather that having food is no big deal, don't make it seem like this is the first meal you've had in forever. Another rule (not the same but similar) is to finish each course at the same time as the host, not sooner nor later.
- sevencolors 6y agoYeah my mom used to chastise me for eating too fast. Later i realized it was because she overcooked everything so meats were really tough and i just wanted to get it into my body as quickly as possible Now overcooking a steak is a just sin. It should be like butter
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- person_of_color 6y agoCould this result in less fat gain?
- James_Henry 6y agoIt may make someone eat less overall over time, as satiety seems to be decreased. There is quite a literature on the topic.
- Jonanin 6y agoThe title appears to be wrong. Chewing more increases insulin concentration: Meanwhile, plasma concentrations of glucose (P= 0·024), insulin (P< 0·001) and GIP (P< 0·001) were higher following the forty-chews meal." Doesn't this suggest that if you want to eat a lot of food but don't want to absorb too much of it (i.e., are concerned about weight gain), you should chew less?
- xenonite 6y agoIndeed, the hacker news title appears to be wrong. But your conclusion and the paper's title is right: "Increasing the number of masticatory cycles is associated with reduced appetite and __altered__ postprandial plasma concentrations of gut hormones, insulin and glucose" One may also add (2012) to the title.
- James_Henry 6y agoI wouldn't say that the parenthetical in the comment you are responding to is correct: > Doesn't this suggest that if you want to eat a lot of food but don't want to absorb too much of it (i.e., are concerned about weight gain), you should chew less? In the study they found that more chewing was correlated with higher satiety and lower food intake in the follow up meal. This may show that if you are concerned about weight gain you should chew more and then you'll naturally eat less.
- xenonite 6y agoYes, I also think that the raised question is really something worthy to explore, especially in the long run.
- tootie 6y agoBut is it higher satiety because your body is absorbing more nutrients? In that case, it seems to be a wash. Chewing slowly just means you can get by with less volume of food.
- hliyan 6y agoThis has always been my intuition: more time for the enzymes in saliva to work, and finer particles and more surface area for stomach acids to attack means faster digestion. Which in turn means a steeper rise in blood sugar.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoSo everyone's parents and grandparents were right ! Science !
- TimMurnaghan 6y ago"Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher
- hedberg10 6y agoI, too, enjoy mastication with my denticles, fellow human! How is your [star] light cycle going? Can I interest you in some perambulation in a sparsely populated area later on?
- guerrilla 6y agoHave you ever seen the web comic Strange Planet? [1] I tell people it's a great way for them to understand what high-functioning autism feels like for some of us and it's hilarious. 1. https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/ https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/
- qwerty1234599 6y agoAnecdotal experience: Chrewing food thorougly also reduces acid reflux symptoms.
- grandchild 6y agon = 21 That seems a little low to draw conclusions from?
- tlb 6y agoIt depends how big the effect size is. You can conclude that falling off a 100' cliff is harmful with as little as n=2. Here, the effect size is big enough to get significance with n=21. For tiny effects like in priming studies, you need much larger samples.
- pftburger 6y agoMy gut feel (...) is that not controlling for time per unit of mass consumed invalidates the result, as hormonal signals are slow. IE, 25g per minute chewed 15 times vs 25g per minute chewed 40 times. This would be highly dependant on the type of food. Bread (and pizza) chunks break down well in the gut, in comparison to mushrooms that hardly break down at all after chewing. Insulin is released in response to blood sugar. Guesswork extrapolation : Chewing more increases surface area increasing the speed of digestion. I am not sure how chewing interacts with the amount of overall time food spends in the gut. Still very interesting work. I would love to see an analysis of stomach acid production in relation to chewing cycles. Of note, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't n30 the minimum for statistical significance? (even though n30 is still laughably low, and id prefer n3000)
- James_Henry 6y ago> Of note, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't n30 the minimum for statistical significance? (even though n30 is still laughably low, and id prefer n3000) It depends on the size of the effect, among other things. Maybe you are thinking about student-t distributions being approximated by normal distributions? > Insulin is released in response to blood sugar. This is true, but is only part of the picture. There are other hormones like incretins. There is even what they call the cephalic phase insulin response that occurs before blood glucose concentrations increase. I think it even can occur just from imagining eating food.
- jcims 6y agoI’m sure it has nothing to do with this but my youngest used to chew her food forever when she was a kid. Like over a minute per bite. I inhale my food so i was glad she was taking her time, but we ultimately coached her to speed it up a little. Fast forward a few years and her pancreas tapped out...type 1 diabetes.
- netmonk 6y agoVery interesting, in regard of this man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher who was advocating for chewing 100 times before swallowing. "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." he used to say
- peter_retief 6y agoMy Nana was right, she would take a bite of food and put her knife and fork down while she chewed, it could take quite some time to finish a plate of food. She was always thin and had good energy levels.
- recursive 6y agoOn the other hand, I've effectively added a year of free time to my life by eating as fast as physically possible all the time.
- nevertoolate 6y agoHow do you eat as fast as possible? Without chewing solids or not eating solids?
- recursive 6y agoI just chew real fast.
- sradman 6y ago> The results suggest that a higher number of masticatory cycles before swallowing may provide beneficial effects on satiety and facilitate glucose absorption. I wonder if the satiety increase isn’t due to spreading consumption over a longer period of time. Increasing the time between bites might also improve satiety. I didn’t read the full paper, this point may have been addressed.
- lucioperca 6y agoThe title is wrong chewing carbohydrates for long will break them down to sugar. Try chewing bread for some minutes or fall a sleep with bread in your mouth. This will taste quite sweet. Hence chewing longer bread (pizza) will become more sugary and your insulin output rises. It is also written in the abstract. The paper reports that more chewing lead better satiety and facilitate glucose absorption. From what I understand this means that they chewing gives you more net energy out of your carbohydrate food.
- nimish 6y agoAssuming the paper is right and the title is wrong: Of course? Insulin is the hormone that regulates uptake of sugars and mastication releases simpler sugars by literally cracking bigger ones? Weve known that the digestion of carbs begins in the mouth. Processed foods are notorious for higher glycemic index numbers and in many cases they are simply externally pre-masticated by grinding, thereby skipping a step that might have some sort of feedback mechanism
- srtjstjsj 6y agoCan you literally crack a carb into a sugar? I don't think so. Your pepsin can chemically separate it though.
- mmm_grayons 6y agoI don't believe that's possible either, but processing can make a lot more surface area available on which enzymes can then act.
- nimish 6y agoAbsolutely not sure but isn't starch just a long chain of sugars that we can break apart? Might not get it down to a monomer but certainly breaks it apart for the enzymes to have more ends to attack.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI worked on a process to reduce a vatful of long-chain polysaccharides to dextrose. The resulting dried powder was shipped as 'coffee creamer'. But not sure how efficient the process would be on starch - we started with much shorter chains (sucrose etc but some starch).
- regularfry 6y agoIs it just me that's really annoyed they put the p values in the abstract, but not the effect sizes?
- James_Henry 6y agoIt's pretty common and rather annoying
- magwa101 6y agoI wonder about different methods of cooking like pressure cooking vs fry or bake.
- nickpinkston 6y agoFunny enough there was a guy 100 years ago who promoted the same thing - called it "Fletcherizing" haha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher
- dboreham 6y agoLike Grandma always said..
- unbalancedevh 6y ago>> Compared with fifteen chews, chewing forty times per portion resulted in lower hunger (P= 0·009), preoccupation with food (P= 0·005) and desire to eat (P= 0·002). It's a good thing, because while I'm taking 40 chews per bite of pizza, all of my buddies are inhaling theirs, and there's none left after I've finished my slice.
- emsy 6y agoAs a slow eater myself: Get better friends.
- pc86 6y agoAwfully presumptuous to assume that just because their friends aren't waiting 3x as long as they need to, that they're bad friends.
- red369 6y agoI assumed the comment above meant that if they don't save any for a slower eater, they're bad friends (likely at least partially a joke).
- emsy 6y agoNo it's bad if your friends gobble up all the food without leaving anything for someone that eats slower. I would never do that even if I was a fast eater. But also, as the other reply pointed out, it was tongue in cheek.
- blondie9x 6y agoThis article has killed Soylent.
- James_Henry 6y agoCould you explain?
- nyghtly 6y agoI think it's a joke based on the fact that you don't chew soylent. It is interesting to think about the fact that soylent is effectively "chewed for you" via pre-processing. Maybe if we could chew soylent then it would be a better food substitute, because we would feel fuller after eating it.
- chewz 6y agoReminds me of The Great Masticator Horace Fletcher from hundreds years ago.. "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher Franz Kafka chewed his food excessively to the extend that people refused to eat dinner with him.
- m3kw9 6y agoChewing and saliva helps a lot to break down food before your system needs their own methods to further breaking them down. This makes sense
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]